As an MSNBC host and editor-at-large of The Nation, Chris Hayes has written extensively on liberalism and labor politics; and as a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, he has worked on issues of socioeconomic inequality. It is this political and analytic background that Hayes brings to bear upon his diagnosis of America’s current condition in The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.
Hayes offers a strongly evidenced and well-developed case concerning the disastrous role of the American meritocracy in creating failed institutions, a convincing examination characterizing the majority of his book. The solution that Hayes proposes to address the maladies of meritocracy, however, highlights the underlying tensions in the author’s argument, resulting in a puzzling and unsatisfactory conclusion. On the whole, Twilight of the Elites is an eminently confronting and deeply compelling book that serves to provoke both debate and action.
A Decade of Failures
Hayes begins by taking stock of America’s recent history—a downward trajectory of public and private sector failings and institutional dysfunction—culminating in the “Crisis Decade” of the past ten years. “America feels broken,” writes Hayes. “The cumulative effect of these scandals and failures is an inescapable national mood of exhaustion, frustration, and betrayal,” leaving us “in the midst of a broad and devastating crisis of authority.” To understand why “all the smart people fucked up, and no one seems willing to take responsibility,” Hayes contends that America’s meritocratic system, which cultivated these leaders, has faltered. And the fragility of the meritocracy and its reinforcement of inequality have led to an America that “isn’t very meritocratic at all.”
Hayes draws upon the work of theorists Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Gaetano Mosca to explore the inherent pitfalls of meritocracy. It is an approach that at once illuminates and adds much analytical weight to Hayes’ empirical evidence. Drawing from Robert Michels’ Political Parties, Hayes argues that the need for organization and delegation in any political party leads to the creation of an elite cadre. It follows that true democracy is in practice impossible, and oligarchy is inevitable. For Hayes, this progression is a key explanation for what he calls the “Iron Law of Meritocracy.”
Taking the idea of a pure, functioning meritocracy to task, Hayes posits that meritocracy, which combines a difference in talents and the possibility of mobility, runs up against reality, where “the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility.” That is, under the “Iron Law of Meritocracy,” the meritocratic elites who have risen to the top find ways to keep themselves there.
Hayes develops his case by examining the way our meritocratic system—a legitimized “hypercompetitive social order”— has created morally hazardous conditions. Hayes assesses cases such as Enron’s fraudulent business practices and the drug doping scandals that rocked American baseball, detailing the ways in which the competitive environment and incentive structures within these institutions rewarded cheating and fraud.
Tying his thinking to “Gresham’s Law,” whereby dishonest behavior crowds out honest exchange, Hayes sees a similar process at work within the meritocratic system. In the case of Enron, “bad money drives out good,” while in baseball, “players on steroids push out those who don’t juice.” Thus America’s fetishization of “ceaseless competition and meritocratic ascent” has in fact enabled an intensely competitive, high-reward environment that is “prone to produce all kinds of fraud, deception, conniving, and game rigging.”
The Meritocratic Mind
Hayes’ method for examining these meritocratic blunders brings him to a detailed analysis of the mindsets and pathologies of those at the very top. He sees the symptoms of elite failure (corruption, self-dealing, status obsession, and blinkered thinking) as linked to the psychology of “threatened egotism.” This mindset in turn stems from the pressures of a meritocratic system that emphasizes constant competition and endless striving. The end result is a less empathetic ruling class, one that is “always looking at the next rung upon on the social ladder” rather than empathizing with “those on the rungs below.”
Hayes also alleges the development of a “Cult of Smartness,” where so much faith and deference are paid to experts that thought becomes deeply inflexible and in some cases—such as the misguided information that facilitated America’s path to the War in Iraq—utterly disastrous. Furthermore, Hayes provides well-documented examples of institutional inter-dependence, collusion, group thinking, and inappropriate conflicts of interest such as doctors and the pharmaceutical industry, financial firms and ratings agencies, and Capitol Hill and lobbyists. All this paints a grim picture of just how much the meritocratic process has crumbled at the very top.
With all their shortcomings, Hayes envisions the ties between the nation’s leadership and its citizens at a breaking point.
Insurrectionism v. Institutionalism
While the strengths of Twilight of the Elites lie in Hayes’ use of theoretical explanations that are strongly reinforced by studies, polls, and other sources, the author is at his most compelling in his ability to stir emotions. Hayes raises a sense of collective injustice and outrage at just how badly the game has been rigged and calls for solidarity in overcoming such corruption and inequality. This call echoes throughout the entire book, with most of its chapters ending in a conclusion that the situation is one of them-against-us, with the elites only growing more powerful.
It is for this reason that the solution that Hayes comes to at the end of Twilight of the Elites is discordant with the rest of the book. Hayes argues for the mobilization of a “radicalized upper middle class” in order to bridge the social distance between elites and their victims. Yet this mobilization is expected to occur within the existing meritocracy. It is puzzling that, having established just how badly the meritocratic system has malfunctioned, Hayes argues for a solution that is still based on working within meritocracy—using a broken system to fix the broken system. Moreover, the solution he presents comes across as a feeble appeal to the dysfunctional elites themselves: “they must be convinced that the current status quo is unsustainable.”
One reason for the not-wholly-satisfying nature of Twilight of the Elites is that Hayes seeks to straddle the fine line between what he describes as “insurrectionist” and “institutionalist” reform. Hayes alludes to this tension early on, briefly contrasting the role of insurrectionists who see the system as broken and in need of a complete change of leadership with institutionalists who worry about the public’s loss of faith in authority and the potential chaos resulting from institutional skepticism. Hayes proposes a vision of reform that summons the anger of insurrectionist sentiment while maintaining a faith in the authority of institutions.
But the difficulty is that Hayes has essentially written an insurrectionist book which harbors institutionalist fears. His sophisticated and well-supported analyses show exactly how, why, and by what means meritocracy has led to a self-serving elite; his insider anecdotes show just how cynically corrupt our leaders were as they skirted the system. His focus on unfairness and inequality orients his book towards the masses and non-elites who must work together. With an insurrectionist arc and an insurrectionist message, the book’s institutionalist ending is both jarring and disappointing. One can understand why Hayes does not want to position himself wholly in either camp, avoiding what he dismisses as “nihilism and manic, paranoid distrust.”
One is left with too many questions. Why should we trust the meritocratic elite to fix itself? How can we believe that they will care about its victims? What makes these broken institutions worth fixing? Had these problems been addressed earlier (or at all) in the book, Hayes’ prescription would appear much stronger. Twilight of the Elites is still a compelling and powerfully argued read, particularly given the substantive and nuanced analyses developed in most of the book. As a diagnosis of America’s condition, Twilight of the Elites elucidates a richly drawn narrative of what and how things went wrong. A convincing solution, though, might have to be found elsewhere.